It's a sun-dappled Saturday, and Morty is readying his kids for a frolic in the local park when his cell phone and beeper start dancing on his belt. Without looking, he knows that this is not good. He pats his son on the head, feels the warmth of him, then snaps his pager up, reading the LED display. Another suicide bombing — this time it's a café. He fobs the kids off on his wife, jumps in his car, and without benefit of lights or siren races up the Israeli coast to Haifa.

On the drive, he takes calls giving him directions and details. News reports on the radio say there were shots fired before the bomb went off, and if this is true, it is something new, a change in tactics. His head is a catalog of destruction, of terror attacks and suicide bombings. At the scene, Morty unfolds all six feet three inches of himself out of his Mazda and squints into the harsh midday light. There is the usual controlled chaos of a bombing — first responders, cops and EMTs and firefighters. It's been an hour since the blast, and he knows the wounded and dying will be gone, whisked to hospitals, the test for chemical and biological agents done, the search for secondary devices complete. He sees distraught relatives gathering, hopeful and despairing. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his credentials, which identify him as NYPD detective first grade Mordecai Dzikansky, tinning his way past the cop enforcing the perimeter.

The Maxim restaurant is a small storefront sitting on a bluff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Right away he's taking notes — how far out are the roadblocks searching for accomplices, where is the police perimeter? He steps lightly, careful to avoid anything that might be evidence, anything that used to be part of someone. For a second, he takes in the pleasant Mediterranean breeze, as if to assure himself that life goes on, then into the carnage he steps. He fights an impulse, learned in his days with Manhattan South homicide, to light up a stogie to mask the stink of slaughter. Back in New York, the old-timers would reach behind the bar, pour a couple fingers of Johnnie Black, and crouch, reading the scene, studying the dead, trying to conjure up their final moments. But this is no sloppy homicide brought on by booze or jealousy, no social-service killing of one skel by another, no scumbag who, let's face it, had it coming. The dead here are truly innocent. And that is all that is left here, the dead.

Morty quickly discounts the reports of gunfire. It was fragmentation from the bomb that put bulletlike holes in the windows, not any change in tactics. He tries to ignore the gore, to focus on the facts of the case, but body parts are everywhere. There is a fat woman, dead, sitting on a chair, her mass keeping her upright, whereas the other dead are scattered prone, including the man lying beside her, his brains seeping out of his head like yolk from a cracked egg. Witnesses say the bomber was a beautiful Palestinian woman — a lawyer by trade, it would turn out — and her head sits on the floor, looking like a rubbery Halloween fright mask, pretty no more. The world will know her now. Her family will talk of vengeance and God, about a brother killed by the Israeli army, will heap praise on her. Morty will pay attention to none of this. He's a cop, not a politician.

He's busy taking notes, counting the dead, studying the blast patterns, watching his step while studying how the Israeli cops, all too practiced at this, work the set. Bad news ricochets in a well-wired country about the size of New Jersey, so cell phones ring round the place, anguished calls from family never to be answered. Morty has heard the same thing many times and ignores the eerie tones. How did she get in? he wonders. Every restaurant in Israel is required to have a doorman armed with a gun and a magnometer, and they are usually effective and brave; several have died wrestling bombers to the ground.

He checks the bottom of his shoes for mulch. He steps out back, away from the smell of death. He sees a stroller, perhaps blown out by the blast. He's been a cop for twenty-two years, including five as a homicide detective, and his squad drew morgue duty after the World Trade Center, months of pieces of humans, and this is the ninth time he's responded to a scene like this, but the stroller gets to him. He looks out over the deep blue sea, an impossibly picturesque scene. He calls his wife to say he's okay, and then he calls New York.

Ask New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly why one of his detectives is stationed in Tel Aviv and he'll say, "Whether we like it or not, my officers are frontline soldiers in the war on terror." Given that inarguable premise, it makes sense to have some of them forward-deployed. Kelly lived across the street from the World Trade Center, so he witnessed all the horror of 9/11 from his living room. When he was reappointed police commissioner several months later, he was determined to make sure his hometown was never hit again. If that meant rankling guys who draw their paychecks in the District of Columbia, tough shit. The idea of posting local cops to foreign countries was novel, but to Kelly it was obvious. He is sworn to protect the citizens of New York, not salve the egos of bureaucrats.

Between stints as the PC, Kelly served in Washington as both the head of the U. S. Customs Service and undersecretary of the Treasury in charge of law enforcement. He understands bureaucratic inertia, how higher-ups can end up spending more time covering their asses than worrying about how effective field agents are. Like many others, Kelly was unimpressed by their track record in New York.

One of his first moves in the fight was to hire David Cohen, a thirty-five-year CIA man, as deputy commissioner of intelligence, and together they decided to start stationing NYPD detectives overseas, sending them out where the bad guys are instead of waiting for information to trickle down the spook food chain, or sitting around while intelligence-community finger-pointing is sorted out.

"It's hard to find an Al Qaeda expert who does not name New York as terror target number one," he points out. Still, Kelly has to make do with far less federal money than he thinks the city deserves to protect itself. And he believes the Iraq war has made an attack even more likely, because it has given a lot of people who used to sit and bemoan America over coffee another reason to act.

Kelly and Cohen figured, Why wait? They started recruiting smart, politely aggressive detectives from the ranks of the NYPD and sending them to work with Interpol and Scotland Yard, to Singapore and Toronto. And, most important of all if you are sending men overseas to fight and study terrorism, to Israel.

Morty grabs me at the Tel Aviv airport, and the first thing I notice about Israel is the abundance of guns. Ordnance is everywhere. Uzi-toting guys at the doors, M16's carried jauntily by teens waiting at bus stops, 9mm's riding high on the hips of the Joe Citizens gassing up at the local filling station. After dumping my stuff in a Tel Aviv hotel, we drive out to the police station off the road to Jerusalem where Morty has his office. Here, he's a precinct of one.

We park, and as we cross the walled compound, we pass a dozen men sitting dusty and listless, clinging to the scant shade along the wall. "Illegal workers," Morty says. They watch us pass, still with the patience of the truly poor. We enter a corridor where two signs hang; one in Hebrew points in one direction, and the other says simply NYPD with an arrow.

Morty's office is small and contains a desk and two chairs. On the wall are various citations, portraits of Commissioner Kelly and Deputy Cohen, and a picture of Morty taken when Mayor Bloomberg visited to show support after a particularly bad suicide bombing that killed New Yorkers. This is where he hangs his hat, but Morty the cop doesn't sit still well. He needs to be out there. He checks the e-mail from the NYPD and off we go. Morty plans to take me around to meet his various contacts, and if an "event" — as they blandly label suicide bombings here — happens, we'll go.

We stop first in the office of the post commander, a man of middle years who is put together like a collection of bowling balls and has the hardest blue eyes I have ever seen. He's polite in a guarded way and is wearing a polo shirt with an NYPD logo on it. He says flat out he doesn't trust the press, and he wonders why the hell Morty might, then asks that I don't use his name, and I say sure, half out of it doesn't really matter and half out of the fact that he looks like the kind of guy who snaps spines the way you might snap a carrot stick. We chat about New York and the importance of having this face-to-face interaction on a daily basis, of human intelligence, of relationships, how much more effective it is to have an agent in the field rather than sitting thousands of miles away being informed by fax and e-mail and phone. The talk turns to the past problems of noncooperation between American agencies, coincidentally one reason behind Morty's deployment. The commander gets wide-eyed. He shakes his head. "You have to know what's going on with all groups. They have a responsibility to let people know."

I ask a question I will ask all week: What about suicide bombings in New York, or L. A., or at a grain silo seventy miles south of Des Moines?

"You don't need more than ten kilos of explosive to empty New York. It would only take two suicide attacks to change New York forever."

I'm thinking he's right. One in a department store and another, say, on a bridge to Brooklyn. I ask how we might prevent such a thing.

"You can't strictly copy the Israeli way. You can't put a security guard in every doorway. Take some tactics and strategy from us and adjust them to New York."

Tactics and strategy. Be smart. It's a mantra I will hear continuously in Israel. As we get up to leave, the commander says, "The best intelligence in the world is no good buried in a computer."

Morty's beeper is constantly buzzing at his side. Usually it describes sightings of suspicious characters, possible infiltrators, but this time it tells about a woman and her four children ambushed and shot dead in Gaza. The woman was a settler, and she was eight months pregnant, so the attackers made sure to fire a final shot into her stomach, killing the fetus. It's a dirty war, all right. But this happened in the Gaza Strip, territory controlled by the Israeli Defense Forces, and Morty's interaction is strictly with the police within the state of Israel, cop to cop. Still, this will ratchet up the tension level everywhere. Morty shakes his head. "There will be retaliation."

He is a long way from the streets of New York, but he is stationed right where you want to be to get a Ph.D. in counterterrorism. When Kelly decided to expand the NYPD's security perimeter to Israel, Mordecai Dzikansky was a natural choice.

As a rabbi's kid growing up in Brooklyn, Morde- cai never dreamed of becoming a cop. Nice Jewish boys, even ones reared in the ethnically diverse projects of Canarsie, were meant for higher rungs on the American ladder. Their mothers saw to that. Running around the streets with guns, no matter on what side of the law, was best left to others. But when Morty was only seven, his mother died of cancer, and maybe that's the key. If the mother does not die, Morty is probably living out on Long Island, another second-generation economic success story, trading in the Jag every two years, making sure his tony neighbors' arteries flow cleanly. Instead, he ends up muddling in a city college, half-assing his way through two years of accounting. One day playing basketball, he sees a flyer seeking to recruit more Jews for that most Catholic of institutions, the NYPD. Morty, figuring he's not cut out for office life, takes the test. His father the rabbi assures him it is an honorable profession. To friends and relatives, he becomes Morty the cop.

Soon he's pounding a beat in Brooklyn and proudly, even a bit defiantly, wearing his yarmulke always. When Jesse Jackson famously declares New York "Hymie Town" during the 1984 presidential campaign, Morty gets assigned the foot post outside Jackson's Brooklyn HQ. "I wanted the good reverend to see the biggest Jew in New York with a gun," he says. Morty is fluent in Hebrew, and soon he is cherry-picked, assigned to cases on which the language is another tool, helping lock up Israeli drug gangs and money launderers. Later, during the nineties, there is a raft of Torah thefts, and Morty gains minor celebrity as the lead investigator of the Torah Task Force, bringing the crooks to heel. All of this led to homicide, the apex for detectives, and finally to the fight against terror.

When Morty showed up in Israel, there was no system, no structure for having this New York detective on board. "It was hard at first," he admits. "Nobody knew what to expect. I started with the simple notion of respecting the host, not stepping on toes." His fluency in Hebrew helped, and being a Jew did not hurt. But while he always wore the yarmulke at home, here he makes a point of not wearing it. "I want them to see NYPD first — that's why I am here. It has nothing to do with religion or politics. It has to do with keeping New York safe." With no precedent for his posting, Morty just politely kept popping up, developing relationships, making contacts.

Gil Kleiman is about the closest thing Morty has to a partner in Israel. Half Italian, half Jewish, and straight out of Brooklyn, Gil moved to Israel to serve in the army, got out, and decided to stay and become a cop. He's hustled his way up the chain of command and now is the face of the Israeli police to the world, serving as foreign spokesman, the guy you see on CNN after an attack, with his younger — De Niro features, sharp, informed, unflappable. Over Argentine steaks, Morty and Kleiman trade war stories, like all cops, shoot-outs and collars and the brute hilarity that comes with the job no matter where it is practiced. They have the easy rapport of guys who come from the same place. Kleiman makes a point of getting Morty access to whatever he needs.

It's been three months, a scary long time between bombings, and both men are a bit on edge. There are reports of explosions to come laced with HIV-infected blood or with rat poison, of donkey bombs. Tactics and strategy are always changing. Israel averages sixty credible terror warnings a day, and its 911 system lights up with thirty thousand calls a day. It's one reason for the escalation to suicide bombings; abandoned packages in Israel attract immediate response. "We have an enlisted population," Kleiman says.

They look at each other, and Morty says, "The intelligence has been good and it's been lucky."

I ask Kleiman if he thinks we should brace for suicide bombings in New York. "Are you nuts? They already did it. Except they strapped jumbo jets to their backs."

It seems alwaysto be sunny in Israel. We sit in a cozy café, drinking the local coffee, called botz, which has the consistency of something drained from an oil pan after fifty thousand miles, but is excellent. Morty watches the buses go by, points out which routes have been bombed. He talks about the Israeli response, how smart and adaptive it is, how determined to bounce right back. Prevention is one side of fighting terror, and the other is recovery. You can never stop all attacks. The Israeli strategy seems to echo Kings-ley Amis's quip about bad reviews: It's okay to let one spoil your breakfast, but never your lunch. You hit a bus? We'll have the same route running in a few hours. Fuck you.

The Israeli police and their enemies are in a constant state of flux. Once buses and bus stops became popular targets, the cops instituted a corps of security guards whose sole beat is bus transportation. They are young, mostly male, fresh out of the army. We sit for an hour and watch one work. "This kid is really on his toes," Morty says. He has a pistol tucked in his waistband, a metal-detecting wand in his hand, and he works the half block around the bus stop like a free safety trying to intercept, or at least bat down, death. The kid is in constant motion, rangy, polite but firm when he stops young Arabs and peeks into their bags, and does not miss a thing. Morty asks me if I want to ride a bus, which he has often done to watch the security at work. I glance down at my now-empty cup and say no thanks. I order more botz in the sun. I've hated buses all my life, and the idea of flying twelve hours to die in one holds scant appeal.

Police headquarters is in Jerusalem, a large stone structure with spooky antennae on the roof. We park down the block, across from an Arab school; music blares from loudspeakers, and on the playground schoolchildren engage in a tug-of-war. There are one million Israeli Arabs, and so in Israel us is often them. You wonder how well we might treat Muslims in Brooklyn after a few attacks in Manhattan.

Morty is popular here in headquarters. Even among the hardened Israeli police, it's clear NYPD has cachet. Most of the people who pass us give him a shout or a smile. He makes a point to come here two, three times a week, to shoot the shit and gossip, to learn, to gather facts. We pop down to the director of operations. Morty wants to share news about a series of empty suitcases found around Manhattan. It's uncertain whether this is some kind of terror dry run or a moronic prank, but the Israelis know to take everything seriously. Yoram Ohayon has the look of a man who might like to toy with you at chess. You can't just react, he says of the suitcases. "You have to watch the watchers. If it is terrorists gauging your reaction, you need to have people at a remove to see if there is someone watching your first responders." This is one of the lessons Morty has relayed to New York, where the cops and firefighters have long been known for their gung-ho enthusiasms. It might seem simple, but it is a major change in philosophy. Slow it down a beat. Think first. Again, tactics and strategy.

We visit Kleiman in his office at HQ, and he slices open a stapled-shut envelope, rifles through a handful of pictures, and then pushes them across the desk to me. It is a gallery of carnage, of the innocent in all manner of death, stopped forever in midsentence or sip, blown into the next life. As I flip through the stack, I'm relieved that things have been quiet. Do I really want to walk through this shit? I turn to show the stack to Morty, and he shakes his head no. He's been there, thank you. On the wall is a large poster with thumbnail shots of victims, like the ones you see in New York bars with all the handsome faces of firefighters gone in an instant. This poster is woefully out of date. I ask the numbers, and Kleiman has to look for a moment. Morty says, "They always say so many dead, so many injured, and people think, Oh, injured ain't so bad. Well, the kind of injured you get is you'll never talk again, or walk again, or see again, or maybe all three. Injured in these bombings is totally screwed for life. I never want New Yorkers to have to deal with this."

Kleiman has an idea. He motions, and Morty and I follow him into the bowels of the building, where the busiest bomb squad in the world makes its home. Last year it went on eighty-five thousand calls in a country of six million people. Kleiman ducks through a metal door and after a minute comes out to get us. I'm going to be the first journalist ever allowed into this sanctum. He wants me to try on a confiscated suicide belt.

It is a simple but well-constructed harness made of stiff brown leather, hardily stitched, with a large pouch that covers my stomach and half my chest. Thick straps wrap around and buckle in the back. I realize there is no way to put this thing on without help. Inside the pouch are hundreds of half-inch steel nuts packed thickly and sealed tight in plastic. This is where the death comes from. The force of the blast claims a lot fewer victims than the fragmentation that rockets outward when the charge is lit, blowing holes in bodies and ripping away chunks of bone and flesh. I take a few steps, turn, and, even with the explosive removed, feel the awful weight of the thing. I hold the switch in my hand.

"You have just attached a bomb to the human brain," Gil says. "It's the ultimate smart bomb, because the bomber decides when it will go off."

Forget about the seventy-two virgins you are promised; it's the ultimate low-tech fuck-you ever devised. I can't wait to get the thing off me.

Morty the cop travels to where the mayhem is. Kelly sent him with a team to Madrid last spring, and on his own to Moscow, to Istanbul. The circumstances vary. But everywhere he goes, he sees things "with New York eyes." In Madrid he rendezvoused with a team of NYPD detectives, and they were briefed in detail by the Spanish authorities about the 3/11 attack on commuter trains in that city (191 killed) and learned that the bombers had used a vehicle, parked several blocks from one of the train stations, as a command post. This was a valuable lesson. "We realized you can harden a target like Grand Central Station all you want," Morty says, "but it is just as important to pull back, patrol the vicinity as well."

His trip to Moscow was off the books, nonmeetings with nonofficials in a surreal cold-war flashback, but the target of the terrorist attack there in February was a subway (forty-one killed), and there are few other cities in the world that rival New York for underground trains. In Istanbul late last year, the targets were synagogues (twenty-five killed). Who did it? Do they have comrades in the mosques of Brooklyn, say? He recently spent ten days in Jordan getting to know the players in counterterrorism there. Because someday one of these new contacts might pick up the phone and call the guy from New York.

On my last night, we stroll down the Tel Aviv promenade, Morty enjoying a fat Cuban cigar. It's South Beach without the silicone, Copacabana without marauding street urchins. Morty is lucky to have his wife and three kids with him here, even if his kids attend a school where they are watched over by rifle-toting men. Even if his wife has to think twice about where to go shopping or where to bring the kids for fun. Morty talks about missing New York. He misses a good heaping diner breakfast of corned-beef hash and home fries, he misses having a partner like Tommy Hayes to bounce things off of, he misses the pizza at Sacco's, the bagels up on 102nd Street. He misses his old boss, Detective Sergeant Brian McCabe, who schooled him in many ways and who just retired, and Morty, far from home, will not make it to the racket thrown in McCabe's honor.

We pass the Dolphinarium, site of one of Israel's worst suicide attacks (twenty-one killed, in 2001). It was a waterfront disco, and I have seen the pictures of the teenagers who had been standing in line on a beautiful night, anxious to get in and dance, to chase some promise. They died aligned neatly where they fell, full of holes.

We stop at Mike's Place for fajitas. Morty points above the doorway and says that on his first visit here, last year, a suicide bomber's torso had been impaled right there. Morty learned that day that fat suicide bombers wear the device in the back, because to put it over the belly would be too obvious. The Mike's bombing rang bells for a few reasons. First of all, the bomber was Indian, had apparently been studying in Syria, and was a British subject who spoke English, none of which were the usual Palestinian traits. Second, Mike's is adjacent to the U.S. Embassy and is frequented by Americans, and the attack occurred shortly after the invasion of Iraq.

It's almost comical when we tell the bartender we're tourists; I have been racially profiled as a cop since I was old enough to shave. The bartender smiles and puts heaping mounds of sizzling meat before us. The beer is icy. The only other Americans in the place sit against the back wall and have tattooed arms and buzz cuts and look like they run through tracer rounds for recreation. Everybody eyes everybody.

Maybe because the Jews have suffered so many horrors over the centuries, there is very little in the way of monuments to the recent dead in Israel. But in Mike's there is a plaque that lists the names of those who died in the attack there, and then reads, "Time will change everything, but that doesn't mean we will forget you. 4/30/03."

As we finish our meal, Morty talks about that day and about what he saw here, and it is obvious that he will never forget those dead. I ask him about attacks coming to America. He stares at the names inscribed on the wall and shakes his head. "The $64,000 question," he says, "is not when, but why it has not yet happened."